He is so good at getting subtle facial expression through the prosthetic. Really remarkable.

I think the success of features based on calculated track position - like DRS and the Virtual Safety Car - proves that the time has come for Mario Kart style power-up cubes. Project them onto AR displays in the drivers’ helmets, and show them on the TV feeds.

• Mushroom allows the driver to cut corners and speed over track limits.
• Squid ink appears in the field of view of all other drivers’ visors.
• Verstappen gets blue-shelled and all his power cuts out until he’s stationary!
• etc.

Call me crazy, but I think in 10 years time you’ll be looking back on this post as prescient.

8bitdo (and the other major 3rd party controller makers) have a license. Their controllers are even advertised on Microsoft’s site - e.g. https://www.xbox.com/en-US/accessories/mobile-gaming/sn30-pro

[Edit: @[email protected] points out correctly that this controller does not with with Xbox - it’s for mobile. Oops. There are some that do though - see later replies!]

Yes, there’s a proprietary authentication mechanism. It’s been used in all controllers from the Xbox One, released in 2013, onward. At the moment, at least publicly, it remains uncracked. That’s actually quite impressive!

I think a lot of people are interpreting this news to mean that all third party Xbox controllers will stop working. Controllers from the likes of PowerA, Razer or 8bitdo. But they will still work. They are licensed by Microsoft and contain their proprietary authentication processors.

Some third party accessories like the Cronos Zen allow other controllers (Joysticks, wheels, PC gamepads, Playstation controllers etc.) to work with Xbox - and also often contain ‘cheat’ mechanisms (like automatic direction input to compensate for gun recoil in shooters). They require you to connect an authentic Xbox controller to them and hijack communication to do ‘authentication’ via the authentic controller. Perhaps Microsoft has worked out a way to detect this?

Lastly, there are some cheap third party controllers, often from Chinese manufacturers, that seem, at the moment, to ‘just work’ without being licensed by Microsoft. General online consensus seems to be that they’re using recycled authentication chips - but perhaps some contain cracked copies of the algorithm and Microsoft has figured out a way to tell?

It’s these last two categories that Microsoft is presumably cracking down on.

The idea is still around! Apple’s APFS file system (and HFS+in its later days) support sort-of transparent compression, and on all its platforms most system files - the ones that don’t change much - are compressed to save space for user files. There’s surprisingly little documentation about this.

There’s a third party tool you can use to compress files yourself: https://github.com/RJVB/afsctool

It looks like the technical details are in this pdf: https://developer.apple.com/support/downloads/Apple-File-System-Reference.pdf

There are two subscription prices - the more expensive one has no ads, the cheaper one has ads.

You can probably guess the focus of https://startrek.website/

Really don’t think that ‘playing the right way’ is a new phenomenon. I haven’t played an online FPS in 20 years, but I vividly remember controversy around camping when I was playing Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 Arena way back then.

Why did Sainz stay out for so long, with damage that was obviously going to send him to the back for no points? Is there some penalty for retiring in the first half of a race?

Or pause during cut scenes!

I think it might be a controversial topic, but I’m fond of tip tinner - something like this:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00NS4J6BY

Playing through the Legendary Edition remasters on Xbox right now - I second this recommendation, they’re a lot of fun.